A Sense of Scale

As a sculptor, when I hear about scale, I first think about studies of proportions, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing Vitruvian Man perhaps the most iconic example. It is based on the ideal human proportions as described by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who believed the human figure to be the principal source of the aesthetics of proportion in classical architecture.

With the expanding universe of knowledge, we realize that we can make things that are much bigger or smaller than ourselves. How much bigger and how much smaller? Is it infinite? In order to help gain a sense of scale, I will be exploring examples of these growing and shrinking worlds of orders of magnitude through art.

Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.